A new resource for all things installation art is here! Join host Anastasia Parmson – an artist herself — as she uncovers stories, challenges, and lessons from behind the scenes.
The show brings you in-depth conversations with internationally renowned artists and arts professionals who have exhibited installation art on the global stage. In each episode, you will hear about the creative process and the personal journeys of these exceptional artists.
We will gain insights into the unique joys and challenges; as well as the logistical and financial aspects of working with installation art.
Join us every fortnight as we shine a light on this underserved field, helping artists feel less alone in their studios and providing a platform for community building and knowledge sharing.
Subscribe to The Installation Art Podcast on your favourite podcast app and follow us on Instagram @installationartpodcast to stay updated and connect with fellow enthusiasts.
Website: https://installationartpodcast.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/installationartpodcast
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/installationartsociety/
Site
RSS
Apple
Data updated on 20/08/2026
Recent rankings
Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.
Shared links between episodes and podcasts
Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.
Michael Johansson is a Swedish installation artist based in Malmö, known for precisely assembled sculptures and installations made from ready-made objects that he describes as ‘real life Tetris’. His work has been shown across Europe, Asia and beyond, and ranges from ephemeral site-specific installations to large-scale permanent public commissions cast in bronze.
What we cover:
• The art school realisation: being technically skilled at drawing is not the same as knowing what kind of art you want to make
• Sourcing from flea markets and secondhand stores
• Institutional installations made entirely from objects borrowed from a museum's own back rooms and storage
• Residencies for installation artists and the newer model he thinks would work much better
• The Taiwan passport disaster: two days to install a large site-specific work and why it turned out almost too good to be true
• Time as the greatest challenge: procrastinating until the last possible moment and forgetting to eat
• Moving a whole city: why an entire Swedish town is being relocated and how his new project is linked
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large-scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
Samuelle Green: Immersive Paper, Career Moves & Reflective Sculpture
Episode 46
Tuesday, July 14, 2026 • Duration 01:03:05
Samuelle Green grew up in rural Pennsylvania in a family of makers and studied art at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Parsons in New York. After nearly 20 years in NYC working across galleries, museums, fabrication and film sets, she made a pivotal decision: leave the city to have the space to finally build the work she had always wanted to make.
That work is large scale immersive installations built from rolled cones of reclaimed books and found paper. Exhibited across the US as well as in China, Italy, France and Estonia. Green’s work has also appeared on HBO and AMC+ and won the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice.
What we cover:
• The decision to leave New York City after nearly 20 years to reclaim her studio practice
• What it takes to create immersive installations out of paper and what happens when huge panels of work go missing two weeks before a show
• The accidental acoustic discovery: paper installations as anechoic chambers, concert venues and restaurant sound dampeners
• Creating art for TV and film sets and what artists should know before saying yes
• Reflective outdoor sculptures activated only by car headlights and flash photography and pivoting your medium after finding success
Samuelle Green is based in rural Pennsylvania and represented by Ivy Brown Gallery in New York and Bonham Gallery in Arrowtown, New Zealand. Her work is also available through Holly Hunt Design showrooms across the US.
You can see her reflective installation in person near Cochecton Fire Station at 54 County Road 114 in Cochecton, New York.
Katriina Campitelli is a Toronto-based public art curator with Finnish and Italian roots who has spent over five years commissioning permanent and temporary public art across Canada. She started during the pandemic by creating a projection mapping festival when galleries shut down, and hasn't stopped since. This is a conversation from the other side of the public art table: what do public art curators actually do, what they are looking for and what many artists get wrong.
Katriina's work spans permanent commissions to ephemeral festivals, sculpture gardens and community engagement programs.
This episode is essential listening for any artist thinking about making the jump into public art. But it's equally fascinating for anyone who's ever walked past a sculpture and wondered how it got there.
What we cover:
• The percent-for-art funding model and why most permanent public art is tied to infrastructure budgets
• What a public art curator actually does start to finish
• Why the only way to learn public art is to make public art and why that's a genuine problem given that public art cannot fail
• The Drunk Frat Boy test: what your work needs before it can be installed in a public space
• The giant chrome cow that led to two years of community backlash
• Why Maurizio Cattelan's middle finger outside the Milan stock exchange became a permanent installation
Doing Public Art His Own Way: Aaron T Stephan
Episode 44
Wednesday, June 17, 2026 • Duration 01:04:07
I made a 3-minute listener survey to help shape the podcast's future. Your feedback genuinely matters.
Aaron T Stephan is a sculptor and public artist who is so interested in process and materials, he builds and installs nearly every project himself. His permanent installations can be found all over the USA and he has also created numberous gallery installations and performative events. His work has been acquired by institutions like Portland Museum of Art, John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Farnsworth Art Museum.
This conversation is candid, funny and full of hard-won insight. Aaron grew up on a self-sustaining hippie farm in rural Maine where self reliance, making and fixing things was expected. That relationship with objects, materials and technique has never left him and sits at the core of everything he makes.
What we cover:
• Proposing projects you have no idea how to execute and teaching yourself new fabrication techniques on the fly
• Performative works where he builds structures around audiences mid-dinner or installs work as a live performance on-site
• Navigating job sites where artists have essentially no power and the only leverage you have is that they want you to leave
• What it actually takes to work at public scale and establishing a practice that lets you fail before you're locked in
• Why the projects that nearly break you are always the best ones
• Advice to artists who are intrigued by public art
Aaron T Stephan lives and works in Portland, Maine. You can see his permanent installations across the US, for example at City of Altoona, IA, at Tampa International Airport, at Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City and more.
Architectural Installation Pioneer: Donna Dennis on Scale, Space & Feminism
Episode 43
Tuesday, May 26, 2026 • Duration 01:31:10
I made a 3-minute listener survey to help shape the podcast's future. Your feedback genuinely matters.
Donna Dennis is one of the contemporary art pioneers who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture in the early 1970s. Her complex sculptural installations draw from overlooked fragments of American vernacular architecture.
This conversation dives into five decades of art-making in New York's evolving art world. We discuss how she taught herself carpentry, pipe bending and electrical work to build pieces based on her body's scale. How Virginia Woolf's "Shakespeare's sister" gave her the drive to make work even if no one ever saw it. How feminism shaped her False Front Hotels as self-portraits when she decided "women's lives were worthy of study." And why she refuses to use the word "practice" to describe her work.
Donna's work is held in collections including Brooklyn Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Key moments from this episode:
• From failing at abstract painting in Paris to her first steps toward installation
• SoHo in the 1970s: how big raw loft spaces made it possible for artists to think big
The Holly Solomon Gallery story: from studio visit ("we're buying a country house") to "I'm starting a gallery and I want you to be in it"—then Whitney Biennial within two years
Bonus: Biennale of Sydney 2026 – What Worked, What Didn't & Why It Matters
Episode 42
Tuesday, May 12, 2026 • Duration 37:37
I made a 3-minute listener survey to help shape the podcast's future. Your feedback genuinely matters.
A candid review of the 25th Biennale of Sydney, spanning five venues across Greater Sydney: from a regional gallery that got everything right to an old Power Station full of missed opportunities.
I spent 10 hours at the media preview visiting all five venues: Lewers Penrith Regional Gallery, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Art Gallery of New South Wales and White Bay Power Station. This isn't a comprehensive report, it’s my personal takeaway on what works (and what fails) when it comes to installation art at an international exhibition.
The 25th Biennale of Sydney, titled Rememory and curated by Hoor Al-Qasimi, demonstrates something that's come up again and again on this podcast: you can have prestigious artists, important topics and historic venues, but if the lighting is wrong, if there's nowhere to sit, if the space outshines the art… it doesn't work.
What I cover:
• Why Lewers: Penrith Regional Gallery was the standout venue
• Some highlighted works from each venue
• The 11-minute sound installation no one experiences beyond 15 seconds – and other accessibility challenges
• Documentation vs art – where is the line?
• A moment of comparison: do island Biennales create better experiences?
00:32 Biennale of Sydney Facts
Art as Playgrounds: Mike Hewson on Infrastructure, Risk & Responsibility
Leave a voice message: https://www.speakpipe.com/installationartpodcast
A conversation with New Zealand artist Mike Hewson, recorded inside his monumental installation The Key's Under the Mat at the Art Gallery of New South Wales – a 2,500 square meter underground park complete with working sauna, laundromat, barbecues, DJ booth, recording studio and playground that's broken every visitor record the gallery has ever seen.
Mike's practice straddles the complex lines between art, infrastructure and public liability. He designs playgrounds that councils don't know how to regulate, builds permanent public sculptures that must survive Australian weather conditions and human interference and he takes on legal exposure that would terrify most artists, all while fighting the perception that making functional, interactive work is somehow "beneath" serious art.
Key insights from this episode:
• The Christchurch earthquake moment: barefoot in a broken city, wondering whether he should keep pursuing art
• Project backlash: dealing with public anger, going into debt on his first major commission and lessons learned
• Strategic pivot: setting a new precedent as an artist-engineer
• True scope of the AGNSW project and how he sourced materials for it
• Hard truth and advice: burnout is not a sustainable business model
Mike Hewson is a New Zealand artist based in Sydney. You can find out more about his work on his website https://mikehewson.co.nz/ and follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikehewson
See his work in person:
The Key's Under the Mat at AGNSW Tank (open until August 2026) https://mikehewson.co.nz/2025/10/the-keys-under-the-mat
Under the Pavement: Tanja Smeets on Materials, Collaboration & Growth
Episode 40
Tuesday, April 7, 2026 • Duration 01:28:53
I made a 3-minute listener survey to help shape the podcast's future. What's working? What's not? Who should I interview next? Your feedback genuinely matters. Fill out here:https://forms.gle/qqHJrMXpsC9UYu2m7
A conversation with Dutch artist Tanja Smeets, whose site-specific installations employ diverse and industrial materials (concrete spacers, leaf catchers, textiles, ceramics and 3D-printed steel) to create large scale works that appear to grow organically from architecture and cityscapes.
Guided by her catchphrase “Under the pavement the roots are whirling,” Tanja's practice reveals what it takes to work at the intersection of art, craft, technology and collaboration.
Key insights from this episode:
• Why art school felt like failure
• Finding and transforming unusual materials
• Residencies at TextielLab and European Ceramic Work Center: pushing porcelain through frying sieves, learning embroidery and more
• The volcano eruption: teaching an assistant to knot lentils into lycra via Zoom when flights were grounded
• Miami airport interrogation: five suitcases, a letter and threatening border patrol agents with a lecture on art
Tanja Smeets is a Dutch artist based in Utrecht. Her work has been exhibited internationally including Manifesta and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. See her work in person at
Bonus: I Went to Helsinki Biennale So You Don't Have To (But You Should)
Help shape the future of the podcast! Your feedback matters.
A bonus solo episode about my last minute art trip to Helsinki: what I saw at Helsinki Biennale on Vallisaari island, three must-visit museums (Kiasma, Amos Rex, HAM), and why sometimes the best art experiences require a little effort to reach.
Last August, I hopped a ferry from Estonia to catch the closing days of Helsinki Biennale. In a day and a half, I discovered why island biennales create magic, why Nordic countries do art infrastructure better and what Australia can learn from Finland's approach to supporting artists and making contemporary art accessible to everyone.
This isn't a comprehensive review, it’s my honest impressions, favorite discoveries and a few rants.
What I cover in this episode:
• Why the ferry journey to Vallisaari island matters (hello, Cockatoo Island nostalgia)
• The challenge of installing art outdoors: scale, setting and competing with historic buildings
• Standout works: Sara Bjärland's bronze "inflatable" sculptures, Tania Candiani's immersive bunker installation, Ana Teresa Barboza's woven bark forest
• Three essential Helsinki museums: Kiasma (timeless favorite), Amos Rex (new obsession), HAM (Biennale HQ)
• Gushing about Helsinki Central Library (Oodi): free recording studios, 3D printing, instrument hire – everything Sydney libraries lack…
• Free museum days and artist benefits: how my Australian NAVA card got me free entry in Finland (but not in Sydney... explain that)
00:00 Why I Went To Helsinki Biennale
01:20 Getting to Vallisaari
Drawing in Space: Monika Grzymala on Tape, Ephemeral Art & Intuition
A philosophical conversation with Berlin-based artist Monika Grzymala, whose spatial drawings transform architecture with nothing but kilometers of black tape, intuition and intense physical labor.
Monika's practice is deceptively simple: she works alone, without assistants, using adhesive tape to create immersive three-dimensional drawings that respond to each unique space. But beneath that simplicity we discuss profound questions about ephemerality, energy, presence and what remains when a work only exists for weeks before disappearing…
From training as a stone sculptor to making her first site-specific drawing on ice at a Hamburg skating rink, from dumping all her figurative work after one transformative conversation with her professor to developing custom tape formulas with German manufacturers—Monika's journey reveals how radical simplicity can be the most powerful artistic choice.
Key insights from this episode:
• How one professor's comment changed everything
• The longevity of tape installations: 2-3 months before they fall apart (and why that's intentional)
• Documentation philosophy: why time-lapse videos don't capture the real process
• Living inside an installation: the collector who surrounded herself with Monika's work
• Advice for emerging artists: you don't need funding or large studios—just do it
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
Venice Biennale 1982: realizing in April the show is in June, not 1984—quit your job, six assistants, work doubling in size
• A car roll into the river in slow motion, with Donna’s belongings inside – and how that inspired a public artwork that also suffered a tragic end
• ”A woman made this!?" The comment that captures why size mattered
Donna Dennis is based in Germantown, New York. You can learn more about her work and subscribe to her newsletter on her website: https://www.donnadennisart.com
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
Sydney Fish Market: https://www.sydneyfishmarket.com.au/
Images courtesy of the artist and Art Gallery of NSW
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
The Installation Art Podcast is a show about people who love and work with the contemporary art medium of installation. The host Anastasia Parmson, an artist herself, interviews internationally renowned artists and arts workers about the intricacies and behind-the-scenes stories of creating and showing work that is site-specific, ephemeral, large scale or immersive.
🔔 Hit subscribe or follow wherever you’re listening to never miss a new episode.
Discover shows related to The Installation Art Podcast, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.
